Coin News

LONDON — Bitcoin is at a one month high against the dollar on Sunday as it continues to rise.

Bitcoin is up 2.3% to $4,538.90 at 3.30 p.m. BST (10.30 a.m. ET):

It marks the first time bitcoin has been above $4,500 since early September and continues a rally that began on Thursday.

Commenting on the rally on Friday, Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at trading platform eToro, said: "European regulators have been cracking down on all things crypto lately and are considering introducing more regulatory framework that could hamper the growth of blockchain based assets.

"On the other hand, Brazil's biggest financial firm [XP Investimentos] has announced that they plan to add bitcoin trading for their clients. In Japan, where Bitcoin has been fully legalized as of April, a large energy supplier called Remixpoint has now added the option for their clients to pay in Bitcoin. This move is actually very strategic, not as much for retail customers as for corporations."

The rally also corresponds with renewed interest in bitcoin from investment banks. The Wall Street Journal last week reported that Goldman Sachs is looking at setting up a bitcoin trading operation and Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman said recently that the cryptocurrency is "certainly more than just a fad."

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The Rockefeller family is joining forces with a former Morgan Stanley rainmaker and one of the world's largest hedge funds to form a new investment firm.

Gregory Fleming, a former president with Morgan Stanley as well as Merrill Lynch, has signed as the CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management, a newly formed independent financial services firm by Rockefeller Financial Services — an asset manager with $16.2 billion under management that's owned and run the by family of famed oil titan John D. Rockefeller.

The deal was announced in a joint-statement from the parties. 

The new firm — which will focus on wealth management, asset management, family office advisory, and strategic advisory for wealthy clients — has backing from Viking Global, one of the world's largest hedge funds with roughly $25 billion in assets under management.  

In addition to Viking, the firm will be co-owned by management and a trust of the Rockefeller family, one of the richest in the country with a net worth estimated at $11 billion by Forbes.

“The team at Rockefeller Financial Services has spent years building the highest-quality investment management firm for families and institutions,” David Rockefeller, Jr., Chairman of Rockefeller Financial Services, said in a statement. “We look forward to Greg’s leadership and Viking’s support to expand the Rockefeller platform and bring new products and services to our clients.”

Fleming left Morgan Stanley in 2016 and in the meantime has been banking high-profile clients like Derek Jeter — who is part of a group that just bought the MLB's Florida Marlins for $1.2 billion — and Canadian billionaire Paul Desmarais, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

“I look forward to leading Rockefeller into its next chapter, backed by the Rockefeller family and my new partners at Viking,” Mr. Fleming said in the statement. "This is an opportunity to create a unique independent firm focused on wealth management, asset management, and strategic advisory."

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LONDON — Britain's old £1 coins cease to be legal tender next Monday, leaving people with just 7 days to spend the round coins.

The Royal Mint introduced a new 12-sided pound coin in February and the deadline for the phasing out of the old coins is midnight on October 15, which is next Sunday. After that, the coins will cease to be legal tender, meaning shops are no longer obliged to take them.

People will still be able to trade them in for new coins at their bank or the Bank of England, but the Royal Mint is urging people to spend the money so that the old coins can be naturally taken out of circulation.

The Mint said in February when it announced the new coins: "The public is being urged to spend their ‘round pounds’ as soon as possible before 15 October 2017, as they will be re-used to make the new £1 coin."

Go Compare Money told the Telegraph that it estimates around £430 million worth of old coins are still being stored in piggy banks, car glove boxes, and coin jars around the country.

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Andrew Left is back at it again.

The Citron Research founder tweeted on Wednesday that the Canadian e-commerce company Shopify was a "business dirtier than Herbalife."

He also posted a seven-minute YouTube video outlining his bear case, titled "Citron Exposes the Dark Side of Shopify — The FTC Will Take Notice," and posted a report to his firm's website.

In the video, Left lays out the big question he has around the company: Outside the roughly 50,000 verifiable merchants working with Shopify, who are the other 450,000 the company says it has? According to Left, many of them are, among other things, influencers paid to promote the company.

"Shopify, a company that has mastered the good ol' get-rich-quick scheme," Left says in the video. "What's never discussed by Wall Street is the real business behind Shopify."

Left placed a price target of $60 on Shopify's stock, which is roughly 49% below the Tuesday closing price. Shopify's stock plunged as much as 14% on Wednesday.

And while the merits of Left's claims are certainly up for debate, Shopify's stock plunge proves once again that when Left speaks out against a company, the market listens.

Past targets of Left's have included Express Scripts, which he said in December could be targeted during the Trump administration, and The Chemours Co., a DuPont spin-off he warned might be bankrupted by a class-action lawsuit.

But Left is perhaps best known for his damning October 2015 report that accused Valeant Pharmaceuticals of being a "pharmaceutical Enron," and he helped bring up questions regarding the firm's accounting and relationship with the specialty pharmacy Philidor.

Read the full Citron Research report here

SEE ALSO: Hedge funds are turning their backs on tech stocks

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Money may not grow on trees, but apparently, it can grow in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

A report from the security intelligence group RedLock found at least two companies which had their AWS cloud services compromised by hackers who wanted nothing more than to use the computer power to mine the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The hackers ultimately got access to Amazon's cloud servers after discovering that their administration consoles weren't password protected.

"Upon deeper analysis, the team discovered that hackers were executing a bitcoin mining command from one of the Kubernetes containers," reads the RedLock report. Kubernetes is a Google-created, open-source technology that makes it easier to write apps for the cloud. 

"The instance had effectively been turned into a parasitic bot that was performing nefarious activity over the internet," the report says.

The companies impacted were Aviva and Gemalto, both multi-billion dollar, multi-national companies. They were notified by RedLock about the issues. 

Hackers are known to slip into corporate servers to steal data, which they usually sell for money, or give to state-actors who are looking for intel. But bitcoin mining is a different thing all together. These hackers are basically just stealing pricey space in corporate cloud storage. 

Amazon, Aviva and Gemalto did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Power in numbers

Though anyone could try to mine bitcoin off their computer services, the process is super energy intensive, and could be costly in electricity costs alone. But it's worth while for many because success can be very lucrative.

To avoid the high cost of going at it alone, most bitcoin  miners join a pool of different computers which combined their powers to solve complex algorithms. Successfully solving the problem generates a set number of new bitcoin, which as of Friday were worth upwards of $4,300 each. Inherent to its design, the cryptocurrency can be mined until there are a total of 21 million bitcoin floating around the internet, but the process becomes more and more difficult as the years pass. 

RedLock discovered the breaches along with hundreds of other administration consuls which were unlocked across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — most likely by a careless systems administrator. But illicit bitcoin mining isn't always coming from the outside.

CoinDesk reported that two IT workers for the government of Crimea were fired in late September, after it was discovered that they were mining bitcoins on their work computers. In January, an employee for the US Federal Reserve was put on probation and fined for mining on servers owned by the US central bank. 

SEE ALSO: Oracle announces a new automated database that can patch cybersecurity flaws itself

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• EdAid lets people crowdfund interest-free student loans.
• Around 100 students have used the service so far.
• "We want to level that playing field," founder Tom Woolf tells Business Insider. 

LONDON — UK Prime Minister Theresa May pledged on Wednesday to cap university fees at the current level in a bid to "woo" younger voters, but it may prove more difficult than that.

University tuition fees are already at an eye-watering £9,250 a year and rising interest levels, currently 6.1%, mean most students can expect to spend decades paying off their debts.

That is where EdAid comes in. Founded in 2015 by Tom Woolf, a former professional athlete and a Nike ambassador, the firm aims to tackle the problem of student debt by allowing students to crowdfund interest-free loans to see them through university.

"It's taking the idea of the Bank of Mum and Dad and extending that out to friends, family, colleagues, and potential employees," Woolf told Business Insider.

Students from low and middle-income backgrounds often resort to expensive overdrafts, credit cards, and pay-day lenders because their parents do not have the private means to bankroll their university education.

"We recognise that funding is a major pinch point, and that those who have the least access to opportunity are also punished hardest by expensive credit cards, expensive overdrafts and payday lenders. We want to level that playing field," Woolf said.

Once applicants to the scheme pass background checks and meet affordability criteria, the firm allows them to create a crowdfunding page — like a Kickstarter or JustGiving page — on EdAid's site and appeal to friends, parents, grandparents, and colleagues to bankroll the cost of their university fees and living expenses.

If a student is successful, EdAid pays the loan out as microloans over the course of a university education, with EdAid taking an initial fee. The money pledged is a loan, not a gift, but it is interest-free and index-linked to consumer inflation, so lenders earn their money back in real terms.

It is still early days for the firm — it only received its trading licence in May and around 100 students have successfully crowdfunded on the platform so far.

Woolf hopes EdAid will be useful to a growing pool of middle and lower-income Brits who feel unable to afford government loans. He says one of his principal objection to student loans is the fact interest rates are tied to the retail price index (RPI), an inflation index which tracks house prices.

"The linkage of student debt to the RPI and house prices is morally unjust given that there are very few graduates are benefiting in today's money from rising house prices — so why have they chosen RPI?" he said.

"Why are all students punished at university with the full highest interest rates despite the fact none of them are earning?"

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LONDON — Coca Cola is spending £10 million to relaunch Schweppes in the UK as part of a fightback against posh new entrants to the tonic market such as Fever-Tree and Fentimans.

The drinks giant is relaunching its core Schweppes tonic range with newly designed bottles and plans to spend £10 million on a marketing campaign that will include sponsorship of ITV's prime time Jonathan Ross Show.

At the same time, Coca Cola is launching a new, premium brand of Schweppes tonics, dubbed Schweppes 1783, designed for mixing with upmarket spirits — and not just gin. One of its 6 new flavours in the range is salty lemon tonic, designed for mixing with tequila.

The relaunch is Coca Cola's biggest ever investment in the brand and follows the rise of rival tonic brands such as Fever-Tree and Fentimens is recent years. Fever-Tree, which pitches itself as a higher-end tonic for higher-end spirits, was founded in 2005 and today has sales of over £100 million.

While Schweppes remains the leader in the tonic market, with a 27% share, Coca Cola's UK managing director Jon Woods told Business Insider that the brand has "not captured our full share of the growth that's been happening in the mixer market. "

"One of the great things about competition is it forces you to look at your own business and decide how you could be better," Woods told Business Insider. "We've taken a while, watched the market to see how it's developed, talked to consumers to see what they want, and we've come up with a really fantastic approach for a relaunch of Schweppes."

Asked directly if the new products were driven by Fever-Tree, Woods said: "I think it's a response to a premiumisation of the category and there's a number of brands in the category which have come along in recent years and started to do that.

"We need to make sure that Schweppes stays relevant and premium. I wouldn't say it's a response to any individual competitor or any individual activity."

As part of the relaunch, Coca Cola is emphasising the history of the Schweppes brand, which it has owned in the UK for around 25 years. The "1783" in the new premium range's name refers to the year that Schweppes was originally founded by Swiss-German Jacob Schweppe, the first person to invent a process to carbonate water.

Coca Cola's new CEO James Quincy, who took the role earlier this year, has said he wants Coke to diversify its range and invest in new products and Woods said the new Schweppes premium range was part of this effort.

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LONDON — The CEO of Tesco insists the supermarket can be as innovative as the likes of HelloFresh and Amazon, and says it is experimenting with new ideas such as meal kits and checkout-free stores.

Dave Lewis was peppered with questions about competition with Amazon at a press conference in London this week, following Amazon's acquisition of US grocer Whole Foods earlier this year.

Amazon has also been experimenting with checkout-free stores in the US and plans to launch them out in the UK too. Lewis said that Tesco is also looking at this model.

"We're trial lots and lots of things — the thing you refer to, yes — but we'll only talk about it when we've done it everywhere," Lewis said.

"The idea that I would come to the market and say, in this one shop we are — I've got 3,600 shops. When we're at a place where we've got something we want to launch to all customers, we'll launch it and we'll communicate it. We've been doing it for a while. Nothing to announce."

Business Insider also asked Lewis if he was concerned about the rise of subscription meal boxes such as HelloFresh and Gusto that deliver pre-measured ingredients for recipes.

Lewis said: "There's no reason we couldn't put together ingredients and serve it to customers as a meal kit in stores if that's what they want from us. There are a number of trials in our stores about exactly that so we can change our offer if ultimately that's how customers want us to operate."

He added: "We test a whole lot."

Lewis highlighted the success of Tesco Now, the supermarket's new one-hour delivery service, as an example of a recent successfully launched innovation.

He was talking at a press conference for Tesco's half-year results, which showed sales up by 3.3% and operating profit up 27.4%.

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